Land Acknowledgement

We gather today on land that was never surrendered. The City of Colorado Springs stands on the homeland and unceded historic territory of many Indigenous Nations, and the very founding and development of this city was in direct violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

The Nuuchiu (pronounced New-chew, meaning "the People"), known colonially as the Ute, are the longest continuous Indigenous inhabitants of what is now Colorado. According to Nuuchiu oral history, they have no migration story. Their people have been here since time immemorial. According to the oral history of the Kapuuta and Mouache, two of the twelve historic bands within the Nuuchiu Nation, Pikes Peak is one of the places where the Creator placed their Ancestors. While Colorado Springs lies within Ute ancestral homelands, the city only comprises a small portion of Ute territory that once covered over 200,000 square miles.

A minimum of 48 federally recognized Sovereign Nations, including the Kiowa, Jicarilla Apache, Comanche, Tsistsistas (Cheyenne), and Hinóno'éí (Arapaho) also have historic ties to this place and continue to foster their relationships with this land.

We name what happened here. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 guaranteed ownership of the area north of the Arkansas River to the Nebraska border to the Tsistsistas and Hinóno'éí. Waves of Euro-American miners then flooded across the region in search of gold in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, placing extreme pressure on the resources of the plains. The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty that originally defined Plains tribes' territory was broken, and a new Fort Wise Treaty of 1861 required the Tsistsistas and Hinóno'éí to cede all previously agreed territory except for a small reservation. In return for wanting peace and trying to comply with government directives, on November 29, 1864, approximately 750 tribe members, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were attacked and approximately 230 killed by the Colorado Cavalry at Sand Creek, ordered by Colorado's Governor John Evans, whose name still sits on a mountain in this state. Many of those soldiers were from the 3rd Colorado Cavalry. Before departing, the troops burned the village and mutilated the dead, carrying off body parts as trophies. The Tsistsistas and Hinóno'éí were then confined to reservations in what is now Oklahoma. Arapaho tribal headquarters, shared with the Southern Cheyenne Tribe, is primarily located in the communities of Concho and El Reno, Oklahoma because they were forced out of this land. On the reservations, Nations faced poverty and disease, as well as targeted efforts to erase their culture. The U.S. government imposed assimilation policies, attempting to erase Indigenous cultural practices through boarding schools and the prohibition of traditional religious ceremonies and languages.

We are a healthcare education organization. That context is not incidental to this acknowledgment. In the 1840s, James Marion Sims, a white doctor in Montgomery, Alabama, performed painful experiments without anesthesia on Lucy, an enslaved Black woman, while other doctors observed. Physicians during and after enslavement often denied Black people basic dignity and personhood through mistreatment that reflected the prevailing and dehumanizing myth that Black people were less sensitive to pain than white people. Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were enslaved women from Alabama who changed the history of gynecology. Dr. J. Marion Sims developed medical tools and surgical techniques related to women's reproductive health with neither consent nor anesthesia, and later became credited as the "father of modern gynecology," while Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were left out of the history books. That erasure is not history. It is the architecture of the medical system we are training people to work inside of. We name it because naming it is the beginning of the only kind of healing that is real.

The Southern Ute Indian Tribe and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe are federally recognized Nations with their current headquarters in Ignacio, Colorado and Towaoc, Colorado, respectively. They are here. They are governing. Their sovereignty is active their treaty rights are ongoing, and the United States continues to violate both. We acknowledge that reality with specificity, not sentiment.

This acknowledgment is a commitment, not a ceremony. We commit to actively incorporating Indigenous knowledge systems and medical sovereignty into this curriculum, to supporting the political and legal sovereignty of the Nations whose land we occupy, and to submitting this statement to Nuuchiu, Tsistsistas, and Hinóno'éí representatives for review, accountability, and correction. We do not speak for them. We speak to our own responsibility.